Qubit, page 2
Vipul stood up. Li Mun waved his hand as though to say Vipul needn’t have bothered. He shuffled over to a large lounge chair directly opposite Vipul and fell slowly backward into it. He stared at Vipul, raising his eyebrows and frowning slightly. Vipul said nothing.
They stared at each other.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” asked Li Mun finally.
Vipul attempted a smile again, but this time the icy overtones were intentional. “Nice to see you too, Li Mun.”
Li Mun glared, motionless.
Vipul found himself looking down at his brown loafers. He wasn’t accustomed to being stared down. Usually, he was the one doing the staring. He forced his eyes up to meet Li Mun’s gaze. “I’ll get to the point,” he said, his voice sounding too wispy. This is it, he told himself. Get it together. “We have a dispute, correct?” He paused, but Li Mun simply kept staring at him. “But I think we can both agree that my brother is a stubborn man.” His tone was sounding better now, a bit lower. “We can probably also agree that stubbornness is not a trait of a good leader.” Ah, that’s too low. Don’t want to sound like you’re trying too hard. “Resolving disputes like ours requires a willingness to come—”
“I’m not going to kill your fucking brother for you.”
Vipul could feel his heartbeat accelerate. Li Mun had skipped ahead of the script. How would his father have responded? Of course, that was an absurd question. His father was dead. And even if he’d been alive, old Bikram would have surely grabbed Vipul by the earlobe and—focus. “Ah,” was all he managed to say.
“Anything else?”
If nothing else, the old man had taught him not to give up. And Oxford and Harvard had taught him persuasiveness. In theory, anyway. “I understand. You’re concerned about the cost.”
“The cost? It’s the heat. Are you a child? In this town? I gotta lay up for months for something like that.”
“Which…costs you…money,” prompted Vipul, trying to conceal his impatience.
“Exactly,” said Li Mun.
Vipul watched the old man. He had barely moved since he’d sat down. Even his lips barely moved. He reminded Vipul of his old Zen master, Yuan. Except that Yuan wasn’t vain enough to bother with a comb-over and wasn’t obese. “But…if I were running things, you and I…I think we’d get along much better.”
“You’ll concede the points if I kill your brother. No. It’s not worth it.”
Vipul suddenly realized Li was bargaining with him. For a moment, he wanted to play just to see if he could win against such a formidable opponent. But then he remembered why he was really here. The points meant nothing to him. Let the cranky old bastard think he’d outwitted Bikram’s overeducated younger son. That actually made things easier. Vipul knew that the dispute between his brother and Li Mun was a complicated affair that came down to how they divvied up the profits from selling whores, mostly from India and China. Li Mun wanted a larger share of the Rathod organization’s profits because he provided most of the political protection. “Three points, then.”
Li Mun blinked slowly and shook his head.
For God’s sake, man, Vipul wanted to yell. He took a deep breath. It’s just a game. And none of this matters anyway. “Four,” replied Vipul. I have to at least make it look like I’m trying.
“Five.”
“Four is plenty. With all due respect.”
“With all due respect, go fuck yourself. We both know you’re a dead man without me. You’re lucky I don’t ask for points on your whole fucking business.”
Vipul sat back. A crooked smile played across his face. Li Mun probably understood his situation better than he did. He was a master. When this is all over, he thought, I’m going to marry your daughter and then study everything you do. “What’s your daughter’s name?” he asked, surprising himself.
“What? What do you care?”
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Yeah.”
“Five?”
“Give me five on the rest, and I’ll throw in my daughter.”
Vipul tried to laugh. He wasn’t good at it. He always risked sounding like a bleating sheep. He’d need to work on that. The important thing was that Li’s joke meant they had a deal. It was an awful deal by any ordinary standards. He’d have a hard time selling it to Anand. But they had a deal, nonetheless. Now he just needed to—
“How do you know your brother wasn’t here first?”
Vipul had begun standing up and so was caught half-sitting and half-standing. He hesitated for a moment and decided to stand. Further discussion just created unnecessary risk that the deal might go sideways. “I don’t,” he replied crisply and began walking toward Li Mun to shake on their deal.
Of course, if Satish had already proposed a deal, either Vipul had just made a better one, or he’d be dead momentarily. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t played hardball—and certain that he was going to walk out of Li’s home alive.
Because there was no way his stubborn brother would have agreed to five points.
Jurong East, Singapore • Katya's Apartment
Thursday, January 18th
9:30 a.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
Katya Brittain absentmindedly stirred her coffee with a spoon, even though she hadn’t put any sugar or cream in it yet. Her compact figure was curled up in the corner of an undersized yet abundantly cushioned sofa that she had selected specifically so that she could curl up in it each morning. Her Medusean black hair was pulled tightly back into a pony-tail, specifically so that she could feel the air-conditioning caress her neck. She stared into the screen of her laptop with dark and curious eyes, while balancing the laptop itself expertly across one of her thighs. She held her World’s Greatest Daughter coffee mug with one hand and stirred nothing into the coffee with the other. The mug had been specifically chosen to remind her of home, since, by necessity, almost nothing else in her modest apartment could.
A grainy black-and-white video was playing on her laptop. She watched as a man approached the entrace to a large resort home. She set the coffee mug down on the end table next to her, which itself had been carefully selected specifically so that it would serve as an extension to the sofa and allow her to set her coffee mugs on it without needing to pay too much attention to what she was doing. Several mugs’ worth of coffee had been spilled over the years because of tables that were either too high or too low, and Katya had been determined to bring an end to that particular tragedy.
She dragged her finger across the trackpad, effectively rewinding the video, and then hit the spacebar on the keyboard to allow her to advance, frame by frame. Once in a while, she would stop and fire off an exotic sequence of keystrokes and mouse gestures that resulted in sending the captured frames to her printer, which was on the other side of the room next to a dying fern, a plant she’d selected specifically because it wasn’t supposed to die.
She hopped up from the easy chair and slid across the floor in her stockinged feet, skidding in front of the printer in a practiced move. She picked up the photos and studied them for a moment. She found their subject to be boyishly handsome. Maybe he’s dating the daughter, she conjectured. She walked over to a bare desk in front of a window, a plastic-and-metal affair that hadn’t been selected specifically for any reason at all because Katya rarely used it, except to set things on it, which is what she did with the photos. She stared out the window, which gave her a view of the rooftops of a number of other apartment buildings and then, peeking out from behind them some distance away, the lush green of the parks surrounding Jurong Lake. Beyond that, she mused, where the wharfs and the Singapore Straight, and then, of course, Malaysia and the Indian Ocean. She looked back at the grainy photo that lay on top of the others, at a young man squinting in the sunlight, his shoulders slightly hunched. He looked vaguely haunted. Probably just another cad chasing after Li Mun’s daughter. Still, she’d ask Ong Goh about him, just in case.
2
* * *
Corktown, Detroit • Mad Dog's Tavern
Thursday, January 18th
11:00 p.m. EST (Eastern Standard Time)
“A million dollars?” asked Kafka incredulously, shocks of black hair emerging at unexpected angles from the top of his oblong head.
“I could have probably gotten two,” replied Lock, finishing a sip of beer. He looked across the bar at the old photo of “Mad Dog” Sullivan, an angry-looking Irish gangster who was the bar’s namesake. Lock loved the antique feel of the place—the bar had originally been a speakeasy back when Detroit was the principal port of entry for liquor coming in from Canada. With the red brick walls and the gaslights glowing in their frosted sconces, it was as though the bar was part of some hidden, timeless alley.
“Two million? Are you kidding me?” Kafka stared straight at Lock through his thick-framed glasses. They’d fallen out of fashion a few years earlier, but Kafka hadn’t cared. He’d been wearing the same glasses since before they were in fashion to begin with.
Lock gave him a sidelong glance and couldn’t suppress a wry smile. “Yeah, he threw out a million when he realized I was walking out. Hell, maybe I could get him up to three. Or five.”
“Lock, you guys need another round?” asked Vicky from farther down the bar, a towel thrown over her shoulder. She wore her dark-brown hair back, and Lock admired the creative ways she found to accentuate an already prominent bosom. Tonight her strategy involved a black T-shirt, torn open at the neckline to form a ragged V-neck, with the words “Ask me if I care” emblazoned across the front in white gothic script.
“Sure, Vicky, but when are they going to get some real Irish girls in here?” asked Lock.
Vicky gave him an exaggerated frown but said nothing, grabbing two glasses from beneath the bar and filling them from a tap.
“So are you going to take it?” asked Kafka.
Lock leaned sideways and sneered. “Really? You have to ask me that?”
Kafka shrugged, as if protesting his innocence. “I don’t know, man. You just get in and get out. Also, fuck man…building a quantum computer? You’d do that for free.”
Lock shook his head vigorously. “I just can’t risk it.”
“I get that, when we were talking a few Ben Franklin’s to change someone’s grades. But…this is the real deal, man. This is…how’d they get your name, anyway?”
“Here are you are, gentlemen,” offered Vicky, setting the two full pint glasses in front of them.
“Vicky, does my friend Lock here look like a criminal to you?” asked Kafka.
“Nah. He just looks tragic.”
“Tragic?” asked Lock, straightening his posture. “I look tragic?”
“Yeah, you got those tragic eyes.” Vicky gave him a sly smile before wheeling and heading back down to the other end of the bar.
Lock shook his head slightly and took a swig from his beer, marveling at the myriad tip-maximizing tactics that Vicky had mastered.
“So how’d they get your name?” Kafka pressed.
“Don’t know. That’s a good question.”
“Message boards, maybe?”
“Maybe. The thing is…”
“Yeah?”
“You’re right. I would do it for free. Imagine having your own quantum computer. That’d be something. I’d love to try Grover’s algorithm on something besides a simulator. You know, for real. Actually see what kind of crazy things I can do with it.”
“What’s the big deal with quantum computers again? I mean, I know that they have qubits instead of bits, but I always sort of forget the details…”
Lock gazed at the back of the bar as though a movie were projected on it. “Well, the easiest way to get it, is to think about simulating quantum mechanical interactions. We can model them with wave functions, but, on a transistor-based computer, running those models is relatively slow because we’re translating wave functions into a bunch of logic operations.”
“Ones and zeroes…”
“Right. On a quantum computer, however, we aren’t using transistors, we’re using the state of a quantum particle directly. For example, the spin—”
“Is that Black Irish playing? I think that’s Black Irish.”
“—of an electron or the polarity of a photon. Yes, that’s Black Irish.”
“I thought so.” Kafka returned his attention to Lock, with mock seriousness. “Continue, please, professor.”
“You asked the damn question. Anyway, naturally, our simulation runs much faster, because, in a sense, it’s not really a simulation anymore. We’re actually changing the state of quantum particles.”
“Like if we wanted to model the effect of weed on the brain, the best way to do it would be to actually smoke some weed.”
Lock smiled in spite of himself and sipped from his pint glass. “Sure. I guess. The thing is, lots of things are based on wave functions, not just quantum particles. To use your analogy of the brain, we know humans are really good at pattern recognition. Like I can recognize you or Vicky. I’d probably recognize you even if you grew a mustache and put on a hat.”
“Or if you were really stoned.”
“Also, yes. But…where was I? Oh, yeah. Pattern recognition is useful for other things, too, like diagnoising medical conditions. So it’d be real useful if we could hook up transistor-based computers to brain-based computers to do pattern recognition. But we can’t because we don’t know how to build brains.”
“Which is too damn bad.”
“But we do know how to build quantum computers. Thanks to CoTech. It was hard problem because quantum particles are really small, obviously, and really unstable.”
“This is all coming back to me now. Each qubit can have more information than a bit on transistor-based computers. Because it’s a wave form? So lots of qubits allows for really complex wave forms.”
“Exactly. It’s like an MP3 file. It’s just a big, complex wave form. But there’s enough information there for us to hear Black Irish.”
“And then you can use a different set of algorithms, like Fourier transforms.”
“Right, because they operate directly on wave functions. Those algorithms run blindingly fast on a quantum computer because the computer’s state already is a wave form, not a bunch of switches that are pretending to be a wave form.”
“Ah, that’s right. And we know how to use Fourier transforms to do things like integer factorization, which normally take exponential time—“
“Well, not exponential, but…almost, yeah.”
Kafka frowned disapprovingly. “As I was saying. Finding prime factors takes a long time on transistor-based computers. But on a quantum computer, since we can use Fourier transforms, we can use a different algorithm, and it runs much faster.”
“In polynomial time. For really large numbers this is a big difference. Seconds, instead of years. Most of the cool things you can do with quantum computers are based on that idea: algorithms that use wave functions, which we have to simulate with bits and bytes, run much faster on qubits, because qubits are wave forms already.”
“I remember you running those simulations. What was that language?”
“QCL. Yeah. I was always trying to show you some cool new algorithm.”
“Yeah,” said Kafka. “But I just wanted to play Super Mario.”
Lock laughed and looked down into his beer. “Yeah, and that fucking game where you had to rescue Zelda and never did.”
Kafka chuckled. “Yeah. That game was awesome. Dodongo dislikes smoke!”
Lock shook his head. “We thought we had it all figured it out.”
“Hey, we had a good time.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Right. Sorry. I just meant—”
Lock waved his hand without looking up. “Forget it. The thing is…”
“What?”
Lock took a long draught from his pint glass. “Stealing it. That’s a different story. And I’m not even sure I could build it, even if I had the plans. I mean, you need diamond crystals, finely calibrated magnetic fields—”
“But that’s the whole idea of stealing the specs. All that stuff would be in there.”
“Yeah. Maybe. But if there’s one detail left out…”
“So…you’re thinking about it?”
“No, man. I mean, of course I’m thinking about it. You know, like I think about maybe one day I’m gonna sleep with Vicky. But not really. I told you. Too risky.”
“Two million dollars is a lotta cheddar, though.”
“Hell, for all I know, it’s an FBI sting or something.”
“A sting? Wouldn’t that be entrapment?”
Lock looked up and found himself amused by Kafka’s earnestness. “You don’t think they’d just lie about it? I’d rather not be the martyr.”
Kafka lifted his glass. “I hear that.”
Lock sank into the aural ambience of laughter and hushed voices and another indie band that he couldn’t quite place playing on the jukebox.
“Hey,” said Kafka. Lock felt a wiry hand on his shoulder. “Isn’t it your fucking birthday?”
Lock shrugged.
“So what are we doing to celebrate?” demanded Kafka.
“Not much,” answered Lock. “I’m opening tomorrow.”
“Aw. Why didn’t you ask for the time off?”
“Need the hours. Every time I do that, Rich cuts my damn hours.”
“Come on, man.” Kafka sat up and looked around the bar. “We need to at least get you laid.”
Lock frowned. “You make it sound like that only happens once a year.”
“Well, since Mandy dumped your ass…”
“I dumped her,” insisted Lock.
Kafka raised his hands in the air. “Okay, okay. I just remember you sitting on my couch—”
“Oh, like you’ve never had a weak moment.”
Vicky seemed to appear from nowhere. “Hey, what about Sophie?” she asked.
